Bob Carroll Jr, the pioneering television writer who worked on all of Lucille Ball's TV shows, including I Love Lucy, has died. He was 87.

Carroll, who had been in failing health for the past month, died on Saturday, family friend and fellow TV writer Thomas Watson said Monday.

Carroll and Madelyn Pugh Davis, his writing partner of more than 60 years, were working on comedian Steve Allen's radio show in the 1940s when they learned Ball was looking for writers for her show, My Favorite Husband.

"They actually conned Steve Allen into writing his own show one week and took the time off to write a spec script for Lucy," Watson said. "CBS and Lucy loved it, and they became the first permanent writers."

Carroll and Pugh went on to work on every episode of the long-running show, Watson said, as well as many episodes of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, The Lucy Show, Here's Lucy and Life With Lucy. The latter show went off the air in 1986, three years before Ball's death.

Many of the shows had essentially the same premise: Lucy gets involved in some routine function and, often through well-intentioned deviousness coupled with incredible clumsiness, manages to turn it into a pratfall-filled disaster.

By China Daily